How not to think about immigration.

IN LAST YEAR'S Australian election, Prime Minister John Howard regularly brought down the house at election meetings--and, some would argue, won the day--with the line: "We will decide who comes to Australia and on what terms." He was, of course, defending his government's decision to bar the landing of the Afghans who had effectively seized control of a Norwegian ship in Indonesian waters and redirected it to their favoured destination--the lucky country.

Watching the journalistic traffic, I was struck by the way a number of half-hidden assumptions were driving the coverage. The most common of these was that Mr Howard was engaging in a futile political exercise that had no meaning outside the election campaign itself since he would in the end be compelled to admit the wretched Afghans. A less common insinuation, though still a fascinating one, was that Mr Howard was behaving hypocritically, since even he knew that he would eventually have to give way.

And what was smuggled into the ostensibly neutral prose of reporters could be found explicitly stated in the criticisms of church leaders, immigration lawyers, nongovernmental organisation spokesmen and foundation chairmen in Australian political debate--namely, that an international set of rules now determined whether or not migrants should be permitted to stay in another country and that such decisions had been removed from the control of national governments. Sometimes this was stated as a legal fact--which in relation to certain classes of political refugees or asylum seekers was in part true; sometimes it was proposed as a desirable reform--which in relation to migrants seeking a better life with no claim of oppression, it might or might not be. But whatever its status, it was clearly the opinion of a highly influential class of eminent persons--the sort of people who run pressure groups, write newspaper editorials, draw up international conventions, draft legislation, and attend conversaziones on immigration.

And it demonstrated that the significance of immigration as a political issue had been transformed out of recognition. Let me justify this apparently dramatic claim.

In the past when we considered immigration, we thought of it as exerting only a limited influence culturally and politically on the host nation even when its economic impact was considerable, as in the United States in the nineteenth century. Immigrants were people seeking a better life for themselves and their children. When they settled in their new society, they would assimilate to its laws and cultural norms over time. They would cast aside any residual loyalty to their nation of origin. Their assimilation would eventually culminate in their taking citizenship. And their children would be Americans, or Australians, or Canadians from birth, not even deserving the sobriquet "new".

To be sure, the arrival of new immigrant groups would also add to and enrich the common national culture to which they assimilated--but it would remain a common culture. And political controversy over immigration--and controversy there often was--tended to revolve around such questions as: Did the immigrants take jobs and economic opportunities from the native-born? Would poor and unsuccessful immigrants not be a drain on the public purse? Were immigrants arriving in such numbers that they might remain unassimilated in cultural ghettoes, eventually undermining social or national cohesion? Might they hold radical political views at variance with the constitutional traditions of their new home--an anxiety that in the United States goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who worried that newcomers might be too attached to monarchical institutions. (In Australia, I suppose, advanced opinion is more worried that so many natives remain attached to monarchical institutions.)

As the Australian debate on refugee and immigration policy has shown, however, an entirely different intellectual context has recently grown up around the immigration debate while no one was looking. In effect, this new thinking transfers the obligation of change from immigrant to host nation. Immigration is not felt to be a major event in the immigrant's life--he is merely going somewhere else. He should have the right to do so, whether morally or as a matter of law, but he should otherwise be enabled to remain his old self. Rather than changing to adapt to his new environment, the host nation should adapt its practices and institutions to him. And that adaptation might turn out to be profound--and to require equally dramatic changes in international law and regulation.